Nederland is het beste transportland van Europa

The European Commission has published today for the first time a scoreboard on transport in the EU. It compares Member State performance in 22 transport-related categories and highlights for most of these categories the five top and bottom performers. The Netherlands and Germany top the scoreboard with high scores in 11 categories, followed by Sweden, the UK and Denmark.

The aim of this first EU Transport Scoreboard is to give a snapshot of the diversity of Member State performance in transport matters across Europe and to help Member States identify shortcomings and define priorities for investment and policies. It brings together data from a variety of sources (such as Eurostat, the European Environment Agency, the World Bank and the OECD). The Commission's intention is to refine the indicators in the years to come, in dialogue with Member States, industry and other stakeholders, and to track Member State progress over time.

Commission Vice-President Siim Kallas, responsible for mobility and transport, said: "The new scoreboard is a fantastic tool that shows visually where we stand in making our transport systems more efficient, more customer-friendly, safer and cleaner. It can of course only offer a snapshot, but it gives us and Member States a point of reference and a source of inspiration for our work together."

The scoreboard can be consulted either by mode of transport (road, rail, waterborne, air) or by one of the following categories:

• Single market (access to market, regulation)
• Infrastructure
• Environmental impact
• Safety
• Transposition of EU law
• Infringements of EU law
• Innovation and research, and
• Logistics.

The Netherlands scores highest across the EU for the quality of its port and air transport infrastructure. The Netherlands and Denmark are the only countries without any appearance among the bottom performers in any category. The Netherlands is also runner-up to Germany in the World Bank's Logistics Performance Index.

The scoreboard is complemented by country-specific statistics without rankings (expenditure on transport, share of the different modes of transport, expenditure of EU funding in the area of transport). The following table shows how many times each country appears among the top and bottom performers. The overall score is calculated by subtracting negative scores from positive ones:

• Single market — This assesses the level of market integration for each mode of transport. For transport by road and rail, the assessment is based on the OECD indicator of regulation in energy, transport and communications (ETCR). For rail, it is based on the market share of all but the principal railway undertakings, both for freight and passenger transport. For maritime transport, the geographical circumstances of Member States with seaports differ widely, so the scoreboard does not give any ranking, but shows the volume of maritime cabotage (transport by sea between ports of the same Member State) where this is applicable.
• Infrastructure — For rail, maritime and air transport, the scoreboard uses indicators based on surveys by the World Economic Forum. The proxy chosen for comparing road infrastructure is motorway density (given that motorways are generally the most developed and best maintained roads).
• Environmental impact — For road transport, the scoreboard relies on data from the European Environment Agency (average CO2 emissions of new passenger cars). For rail, the assessment is based on the share of electrified railway lines among all railway lines (source: International Union of Railways, UIC). For maritime and air transport, there is at present no suitable indicator to compare Member States' environmental performance.
• Safety — The scoreboard includes the provisional EU road safety fatalities for 2013 (IP 14/341). Figures on railway victims are very small in comparison, they include injured persons. Fatality figures for maritime and air transport are extremely small and cannot always be attributed to a specific country.
• Transposition of EU law — This scoreboard shows the percentage of EU transport directives for which Member States have notified transposition measures to the Commission by 31 December 2013, even with delays.
• Infringements of EU law — The Commission was dealing with a total of 202 infringement proceedings in the area of transport on 31 December 2013. They are shown separately for each mode of transport (and in addition, cases that are not mode-specific, in particular concerning passenger rights). The Commission may open infringement proceedings if it considers that a Member State does not apply EU law properly. However, only the Court of Justice can rule definitively that a breach of EU law has occurred.
• Research and innovation — This category, which spans all modes of transport, covers two aspects: private investment in transport research and development (source: FUTRE report) as well as the number of innovative transport companies (from the Community Innovation Survey).
• Logistics — The Logistics Performance Index, developed by the World Bank, is based on six dimensions and rates the relative ease and efficiency with which products can be moved into and inside a country. The scoreboard includes the newest figures which the World Bank officially released at the EU Transport Business Summit on 27 March 2014 (http://lpi.worldbank.org).